Marooned! Read Online Free PDF Page A

ever comes here on Saturday,” he said. “That’s why I like to study here. Nice and quiet.”
    Sean understood that, but he also understood that the greenhouse, with its lush aroma of growing things, its supplemental lights that imitated the sun as it shone on Earth, and its warm, moist air was one place that felt like home.
    “Want to go out?” Jenny asked. “Not for long, but just to show Sean the sights?”
    “Such as they are,” Alex said with a chuckle. “Okay, I’m in.”
    The three of them made their way to an entry dome, where they donned the clumsy pressure suits, then waited in an airlock as pumps sucked the air out. Sean’s heart was beating fast with excitement,and every time he took a breath the air rattled in his helmet, sounding like pebbles falling down a chute. Finally the outer door opened, and Alex led the way out.
    It was cold. At this latitude the maximum outside temperature at noon in summer could get up to fifteen degrees Celsius—not quite sixty degrees on the old Fahrenheit scale. It was barely spring, though, and on this particular Saturday noon, the thermometer would have read minus six Celsius, well below freezing. Alex’s voice rasped over the radio receiver in Sean’s helmet: “We can’t stay out very long in unheated suits.”
    “Why didn’t we use heated ones?” Sean asked.
    “Because we’re not part of a work party, and they’re reserved. Hey, Jenn, let’s go look at the construction site where they’re sinking the new thermal well.”
    Walking was difficult. The ground underfoot was loose sand scattered with boulders of all sizes. The sun hung overhead, pale and shrunken in the darkblue sky. The three of them rounded the edge of the dome, and Sean caught his breath.
    The day was clear, and the towering, rugged cliffs at the base of Olympus Mons looked close enough to touch. They were almost sheer, and they reared up four miles above the foothills. Beyond them was the bulk of Olympus itself, so large that it looked as if the horizon was warped upward, vanishing in a dim purple distance. On the foothills past the settlement a forest of windmills rose, hundreds of them, their great blades sweeping in a gentle breeze.
    Jenny pointed, and her voice crackled on the radio, “In the spring we’ll have real storms, and the generators will have to be cleaned about every other day. They’re sealed against dust, but it gets in everywhere during the seasonal storms. The wind-mills are shut down during the peak winds, but we’ll be out a lot then. That’s one of our jobs, keeping the generators working.”
    Sean felt a vibration through the soles of his feet,and a second later he heard a dull boom that did not come over the radio. “What was that?”
    “Blasting,” Alex said. “The air’s so thin that it doesn’t make half the noise it would on Earth. There, see? No, look over to the left. They’re drilling a shaft right down into the crust. There’s still volcanic heat deep down, and that powers turbine generators.”
    Sean was shivering from the cold. They could see a work crew in the distance, six figures in bright blue pressure suits under a billowing plume of dust from the explosion.
    “This is close enough,” Jenny said. “Let’s get back inside. I’m freezing!” She turned, the sun gleaming on her helmet.
    They retraced their steps and went back inside. Sean felt himself gasping. “Seems hard to breathe,” he complained.
    Alex hung up his pressure suit. “That’s because you were on a richer oxygen mix outside. In here it’s lower than Earth’s normal, a mix of oxygen, argon, helium, and nitrogen. But the tanks give you fulloxygen, because usually when you’re outside you’re doing manual labor.”
    “All the oxygen comes from Mars?” Sean asked. He knew that on Earth’s moon oxygen came from factories that broke down oxygen-containing minerals.
    “Pretty much,” Jenny said. “The greenhouse plants generate a tiny fraction of what we’re